Yoga of Liberation
A heart-based path to spiritual awakening
Craig Holliday
Yoga of Liberation
A heart-based path to spiritual awakening
Craig Holliday
www.craigholliday.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition: November 2020
ISBN-13: 978-0-9911307-1-9
Editor: Suzanne Winters
Disclaimer: This publication is designed to provide accurate and personal experience information regarding the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the author, contributors, and publisher are not engaged in rendering counseling or other professional services through this publication. If counseling advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought out.
Copyright 2020 Craig Holliday. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Acknowledgments
To my family, each one of you, thank you sincerely for all the love and continued support. Thank you for challenging me to be a greater father, for parenthood is a true test of character and demands that we walk the talk, embody the truth, and learn unconditional loveoff the meditation cushion. Thank you, Suzanne, for the countless hours of editing this book and bringing it print. Your tireless support and encouragement made this possible.
To all of my teachers, thank you. I bow before you. To David, my root teacher, for patiently and sternlybut compassionatelyshowing me a much greater world beyond ego. Thank you for spending two decades of your life showing me the way of Mastery. I strive to walk fully in your footsteps one day. To Adyashanti, Ammachi, Lama Tsultrim, Eli Jaxon Bear, and all my teachers in this lifetime, I bow before Thee. Thank you for illuminating the path and sharing with me the awakened experience. To Sri Aurobindo, Buddha, and Christ, I continue to open my heart to you, and I continue to pray that You will lead and guide me in this world.
Dear readers, please know that anything you gain from this work is not mine, but rather it is a gift that was given to me by my teachers. This is how the dharma is spread: from one open heart to another. In a sense, everything of value in this book is all plagiarized from the Masters. I am an ordinary man with an ordinary mindyet something extraordinary was given to me. This gift, I attempt to share with you.
~ Craig Holliday
Table of Contents
To all who are on the Path, my heart is with you.
~ Chapter One ~
Yoga of Liberation
Ever being Buddha, ever becoming Buddha.
At the heart of all great spiritual paths was a Yogione who discovered and lived from the direct experience of the Divine in their mind, heart, and soul. All of us have this capacity to live in union with our highest natureto live in union from the ineffable presence of our hearts.
The spiritual path can be summed up in one movement: from darkness toward the light, from unconsciousness to a greater Consciousness. This movement encompasses the transition from experiencing ourselves as fear-based human animals to the direct recognition that we are Divine beings whose expression is Love, Truth, and Beauty in the world. This path is an ongoing evolution from being narrow-minded and self-centered toward a greater and continuously expanding openness and inclusion of every aspect of life. This spiritual path is not simply about being open and compassionate when we are practicing yoga or meditation. It is the total embrace of ourselvesthe good, the bad and the uglyas well as the total embrace of life in all Her manifestations. It is through this path that we discover a complete non-division within ourselves so thorough, that we become fully and incomprehensibly one with the Divine.
The Yoga of Liberation is a movement from being inwardly divided, lost, and confused by our fragmented egoic nature to becoming whole, integrated, and unified with our inherent divine essence, which is Love, Truth, and Beauty. It is a movement toward alignment and oneness with the Divine, both in our absolute nature, which we experience in times of meditation and union with the Divine, as well as in our everyday lives while we are running around at work or raising our children. True yoga is not a spiritual practiceit is a way of life where there is no separation between the depth of what we are and how we live. To live in this way requires a deep and ongoing surrender to something much greater than our habitual and conditioned egoic minds.
From an absolute perspective, we are already fully one with God, both in our essential nature and in our humanity. We were made by Life and we are Life Itself in human form. There is no way we could step out of our essential nature. There is nothing we could do that God Herself did not allow, create, or put in motion. All is God, all is one. As human beings, we have every layer of creation within usfrom the highest manifestations to the lowest. This is why, within the course of a single day, we can express both the compassion of the Buddha as well as anger or rage. God, Life, the Universe, and us are all one. And all of us together, as one, are continuously evolving. At this time in history, our collective evolution requires that we either take the higher path toward God consciousnessthrough evolving out of our animal nature and step into our Higher Divine nature of Love and Truthor suffer the fate of the dinosaurs and cease to exist.
From a relative and humble perspective, we are all a work in progress. Most of us live in a state of chaos, inner division, and suffering which would be hard to describe as Divine. But despite our confusing and chaotic lives, this is an evolutionary world, and we are all evolving toward a greater and greater manifestation of Divinity. From this place of understanding and acknowledging the evolutionary context of life, we each must ask ourselves, Am I evolving consciously? If not, our evolution as human beings will be unconscious and painstakingly slowone of turmoil, pain, and suffering. We will suffer, those around us will suffer, and perhaps even the fate of the planet will suffer.
Yoga of Liberation is a path to wake up to our absolute nature of Divinity, to come to know that we are Divine in the deepest essence of ourselves, and to allow this Divinity to become manifest in our humanity. It is also the recognition that our very humanity is Divinewe were made in the image and likeness of God. This is the great paradox of life: we are both already human and Divine , one and the same movement of God, here in form. We are Buddhas and are always becoming Buddhas. In our nature and essence we are absolutely Divine, and also in our nature and humanity we are ever evolving out of the animal kingdom and into the Divine Kingdom. This book is an invitation into this paradox to realize our innate Divinity through embracing and embodying our full humanity in an evolutionary context.
In the heart of the yogic teachings and in all of the great wisdom traditions is this invitation to know ourselves as Divine, as well as instruction on how to live fully in alignment with the truth that we are one with all of existence. Unfortunately, most modern day yoga taught and practiced today in the West puts emphasis on yoga as being just a form of exercise. True yoga is a doorway to Liberation from our egoic identification and to the discovery of our inherent Divinity that arises when we step beyond our egoic conditioning and embody our Divine essence. The real power of Yoga is to awaken us to the radiance of our true nature. After all, deeper than simply desiring to have a great yoga body, what we sincerely desire is to know ourselves as Divine in every aspect of our being.
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